#onimai analysis

and that's part of the wish fulfillment! getting to rewind time and go through that stage of development and make friends as a girl the way you should've the first time!!

Mahiro being trans is literally not even subtle by the way.

"I've been in a strangely good mood recently, like my coat is finally cut according to my cloth."

Literal textbook gender affirming care. Despite the fact that she's been cut off from her porn and all the complaining she did about that, and the fact that she woke up in this new body, she's happy!

it is Also at its core motivated by a good handful of the author's fetishes. this, combined with the cast being middle schoolers, is understandably difficult for many readers to get past.

this then tempts one to say, "oh if only the fetishes weren't there this would be Perfect and everyone could love it"

but. the fetishes and the wish fulfillment are inexorably linked. you can't tear apart the trans themes from the forcefem/age regression/siscon/etc.

like the beginning of onimai is really good because you see mihari being calculated right off the bat. In a lot of genderbend manga, you see the MC explore their new body... to various degrees. But here, Mihari interrupts this process. She examines Mahiro's new body before she gets a chance to herself, then quickly heads off one of the main factors which kept mahiro shut-in previously.

Not only does this further Mahiro needing to find new constructive activities to fill her time, it also majorly effects her lived experience in this new body. Before the change, we know Mahiro spent much of her time playing video games or consuming pornography. This would've bred a separation from her body, making it something she only interacted with as an interface with her computer or to produce pleasure through masturbation.

But now, Mahiro is in a new body. It's a young girl's body. From what we know of Mahiro from later chapters, it very well may be the kind of body she often saw in her porn. At this early stage of inhabiting her new body, Mahiro could easily fall back into old ways: sit at her desk, stare at a computer screen, and forget her body exists except for hands on a keyboard and whatever she sees when she's jerking off.

But! Mihari blocks that. This accomplishes two things: as previously stated, it blocks one of the main ways Mahiro occupies herself while shut in, and it makes room for Mahiro to start seeing/experiencing her body as something new. And this does start to happen! In the very next chapter:

Mihari gives Mahiro new girl clothes to try on, and Mahiro is genuinely happy seeing herself dressed up that way!!

This is an interesting bit. I think the most obvious reading is that it reflects the belief that girls are attracted to boys and vice-versa, so Mahiro getting changed into a girl changes her taste accordingly.

There is another reading though, where we see Mahiro from more of a trans perspective. In that reading, I can't help but notice that Mahiro says she bought the yaoi by mistake a while back, and the implication is that she hadn't played through it before.